The space program of the USA cannot function without understanding Earth's condition.
Earth’s ice is changing, (click here) from mountain glaciers to ice sheets to ice shelves. For the most part, land-based ice has been shrinking, and the very definition of a “glacial pace” has changed within our lifetimes. Now researchers have the tools to see those changes every few weeks and at scales as small as 5 meters (16 feet).
Earth’s ice is changing, (click here) from mountain glaciers to ice sheets to ice shelves. For the most part, land-based ice has been shrinking, and the very definition of a “glacial pace” has changed within our lifetimes. Now researchers have the tools to see those changes every few weeks and at scales as small as 5 meters (16 feet).
Using freely available data from the Landsat 8 satellite, scientists are working to provide a near-real-time view of every large glacier and ice sheet on Earth. A group of scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, the University of Bristol, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have started the Global Land Ice Velocity Extraction project (GoLIVE), a NASA-funded effort to better understand how ice flow is changing worldwide.
“We are now able to map how the skin of the ice is moving,” said Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at NSIDC and lead for the GoLIVE project. “From now on, we’re going to be able to track all of the different types of changes in glaciers. There’s so much science to extract from the data.” The effort was described at the 2016 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union....
